Ribofunk

Ribofunk
Author: Paul Di Filippo
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1497613248

Tackling genetic engineering, “Di Filippo’s effervescent prose can provoke both hilarity and haunting reflections on our species’ possible fate” (Publishers Weekly). Ribofunk contains eleven masterful and surprising works of imagination. In all of them, biology is the science that drives the engine of life and of story: the Protein Police patrol for renegade gene‐splicers; part‐human sea creatures live in the Great Lakes and clean up toxic spills; a river has become sentient; there is a bodyguard who is part wolverine and a thrill‐seeker climbs a skyscraper and gets stuck, literally.

Escapology

Escapology
Author: Ren Warom
Publisher: Titan Books (US, CA)
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2016-06-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1785650920

Shock Pao is the best. In the virtual world the Slip there’s nothing he can’t steal for the right price. Outside the Slip, though, he’s a Fail – no degree, no job. So when his ex offers him a job, breaking into a corporate databank, he accepts—it’s either that, or find himself a nice bench to sleep under. Amiga works for psychotic crime lord Twist Calhoun so when Shock’s war comes to her, it’s her job to bring him to Twist, dead or alive.

D'Arc

D'Arc
Author: Robert Repino
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2017-05-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616956879

With the fragile interspecies peace that followed the War With No Name under assault from land and sea, Sheba and Mort(e) have no choice but to take up their arms and enter once again into the conflict that threatened to tear them apart. “Repino's dog, cat, and beaver soldiers are nakedly real, as honest as any characters in modern fiction. As horrible as it may sound, may The War With No Name never end." —Corey Redekop, author of Husk In the aftermath of the War With No Name, the Colony has been defeated, its queen lies dead, and the world left behind will never be the same. In her madness, the queen used a strange technology to uplift the surface animals, turning dogs and cats, bats and bears, pigs and wolves into intelligent, highly evolved creatures who rise up and kill their oppressors. And now, after years of bloodshed, these sentient beasts must learn to live alongside their sworn enemies—humans. Far removed from this newly emerging civilization, a housecat turned war hero named Mort(e) lives a quiet life with the love he thought he had lost, a dog named Sheba. But before long, the chaos that they escaped comes crashing in around them. An unstoppable monster terrorizes a nearby settlement of beavers. A serial killer runs amok in the holy city of Hosanna. An apocalyptic cult threatens the fragile peace. And a mysterious race of amphibious creatures rises from the seas, intent on fulfilling the Colony’s destiny and ridding the world of all humans. No longer able to run away, Sheba and Mort(e) rush headlong into the conflict, ready to fight but unprepared for a world that seems hell-bent on tearing them apart. In the twilight of all life on Earth, love survives, but at a cost that only the desperate and the reckless are willing to pay.

Lost Among the Stars

Lost Among the Stars
Author: Paul Di Filippo
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2024-03-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504093844

A genre-bending collection of speculative fiction from the acclaimed author of the Steampunk Trilogy—with an introduction by Robert Silverberg. Horror, alternative history, science fiction, and fantasy—nothing is off limits when you possess an imagination as vast as Paul Di Filippo’s. In this collection of stories featuring ancient goddesses, the new social media elite, and hermetic cities, he’ll take you on a wild ride through plausible pasts and far-flung futures. In “Ghostless,” a medium learns that ghosts are drawn to—and can alleviate—sadness, so she becomes a matchmaker to both spirts and mortals in need. Flash fiction published in Nature magazine, “Wavehitcher” shows how surfing goes high-tech—and long-distance—with smartsuits that desalinate water, pulsed magnets to repel sharks, and seines that catch and processes krill into a nutritious paste. An expert in industrial metabolics focuses on blending his superior genepool with that of his fiancée’s to save the human race from idiocracy, until a kidnapping in Colombia shows him the folly of his arrogance in “Adventures in Cognitive Homogamy.” These stories will whet your appetite for more fantastical Di Filippo, and thankfully, Lost Among the Stars delivers. Praise for Paul Di Filippo “Di Filippo is like gourmet potato chips to me. I can never eat just one of his stories.” —Harlan Ellison “Di Filippo is the spin doctor of SF—and it is a powerful medicine he brews.” —Brian Aldiss, Hugo Award–winning author of Hothouse “Vibrant, nervy, and full of gloriously wiggy language, Ribofunk is anything but the same old stuff.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Animal Encounters

Animal Encounters
Author: Tom Tyler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004168672

The fast-growing field of Animal Studies is a varied and much contested domain. Engagement with animals has encouraged both collaboration and conflict between researchers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Animal Encounters comprises a series of meetings not only between diverse beasts, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. The essays here collected come together from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and art history, philosophy and feminism, science and technology studies, history and posthumanism, to study that most familiar and most foreign of creatures, a ~the animala (TM). These encounters between leading practitioners in the field highlight the promise and potential of interspecies exchange and mutual provocation.

Strange Trades

Strange Trades
Author: Paul Di Filippo
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1497613183

“Full of storytelling that is untamed, writing that is superb, and tales that are expansive and suggestive . . . a wry romp worthy of your attention” (Strange Horizons). In these eleven stories, including Nebula Award finalist “Kid Charlemagne,” Paul Di Filippo applies his armamentarium of vastly varied literary skills to an examination and definition of the outer limits of an almost unbearably mundane-sounding subject: daily toil or, in a word, jobs. In “Spondulix,” Rory Honeyman, desperate to preserve the meager cash flow in his sandwich shop, starts offering store coupons that somehow take on a life of their own. “The Mill” is the only place in the universe where Luxcloth, treasured and worn by many, can be manufactured and only at the direction of one man. “The Boredom Factory” gives meaning to the phrase “living to work.” Keep reading—it will be the easiest job you’ve ever had. You can try to escape from the mundane, or with the help of Paul Di Filippo, you can take a brief, meaningful break from it. In the vein of George Saunders or Michael Chabon, Di Filippo uses the tools of science fiction and the surreal to take a deep, richly felt look at humanity. His brand of funny, quirky, thoughtful, fast‐moving, heart‐warming, brain‐bending stories exist across the entire spectrum of the fantastic from hard science fiction to satire to fantasy and on to horror, delivering a riotously entertaining string of modern fables and stories from tomorrow, now, and anytime. After you read Paul Di Filippo, you will no longer see everyday life quite the same. Strange Trades includes an introduction by Bruce Sterling.

Seeing Red

Seeing Red
Author: David J. Schow
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2024-01-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Brain-scorching review hyperbole! Pithy critical commentary! Big-name blurb mongering! Hardcore buy-or-die sales pitch hysteria! You'll find none of that in Seeing Red, David J. Schow's very first collection of short stories, back in print for the first time in nearly ten years. It features the World Fantasy Award-winning story, "Red Light," the Twilight Zone Magazine prize-winner "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You," plus eleven more tales as startling, as disturbing, as provocative and unnerving. Between these covers you'll also find an introduction by best-selling fantasist T.E.D. Klein, and "Crimson Hindsight," a brand-new Afterword written especially for this edition.

Anathem

Anathem
Author: Neal Stephenson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 1013
Release: 2009-08-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006147410X

For ten years Fraa Erasmas, a young avout, has lived in a cloistered sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside world. But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change—and Erasmas will become a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world, as he follows his destiny to the most inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond. Anathem is the latest miraculous invention by the New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle—a work of astonishing scope, intelligence, and imagination.

The Child Garden

The Child Garden
Author: Geoff Ryman
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1994-04-15
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780312890230

The multiple-award-winning sf classic from the acclaimed author of Was. In the city of the future, humans photosynthesize, viruses educate people, organics have replaced electronics . . . and almost no one lives past 40. The outcast Milena feels alone--until she meets the genetically engineered Rolfa.